Essays and Articles
Thoughts on technology, marketing, strategy, and more.
Intelligent Network Culture
The hard part is building an environment where information flows, where failure leads to learning rather than blame, where knowledge gets made institutional rather than personal, where the engineers who've been carrying the network in their heads feel safe handing it off to systems and to colleagues.
Love Is Not a Four-Letter Word
I've spent more time than I care to admit trying to find and fix what was broken. What I've found is that the places in my life where I've felt most alive aren't the places where I worked hardest on my weaknesses. They're the places I brought everything I had to the things I already loved.
Leading Intelligent Networks
Hero culture is self-reinforcing because it produces real value in the short term. Breaking that cycle requires leadership to make the structural work visible and valued. The engineer who builds the automation that prevents a class of incidents from recurring is doing more durable work than the one who responds to that incident 40 times. In most organizations, only one of those two gets recognized. That is a leadership choice, and it has consequences.
Intelligent Network Standards
Standardization is a governance problem. It needs ongoing enforcement: design reviews that check new deployments against defined standards, compliance tooling that surfaces drift before it compounds, change management that rejects changes violating the intent model. None of that is complicated. All of it requires sustained discipline over years.
You Can’t Win a War Against Yourself
The people who get the most out of themselves, the ones who sustain momentum, who build things, who seem to move through the world with unusual effectiveness, aren't the most disciplined people I know. They're the most self-aware. They've done the work to understand what actually moves them, and they've built their lives around that knowledge rather than against it.
The Network Intelligence Blueprint
Documentation isn't a prerequisite you have to suffer through before the interesting work begins. It's how the interesting work becomes possible. To unlock faster troubleshooting, security hygiene, automation at scale, AI-driven operations, and new service velocity; you must first build an accurate, current, comprehensive understanding of the network.
Damn the Man. Save the Empire.
Saturday mornings. After-school TV. The video store. A specific window — roughly 1985 to 1995 — when the entertainment aimed at kids like me was saturated with a single, potent worldview: institutions are corrupt or incompetent, authority figures are obstacles at best and villains at worst, cleverness beats power, and the only loyalty that actually matters is to your crew.
The Intelligent Network Mandate
The intelligent network isn't something you evaluate anymore. Parts of it are already operating in your competitors' environments. The question isn't whether your network operations will transform, it's whether you drive that transformation or respond to someone else's.
Networking Silicon That Thinks for Itself
Xsight Labs is a fabless semiconductor company founded in 2017, with about 260 people, $440M raised, and, critically, two chips actually shipping today. Their X2 is a 12.8T Ethernet switch, and their E1 is an 800G DPU. Both chips claim to be truly software-defined, open, and programmable without performance compromises.